A Name for Cold Orbits
by skywalker05
Summary: Something watched from behind the blade of the sword: something that asked: Who are you? Her bones answered: Eris, who was reborn in a car wreck; Eris, who was chosen by the Light and chose it back, Eris who could read people. It asked: But Eris, who are you when you're alone? Eriana and Eris gather their ill-fated team. Eris/Toland
1. Always Darkest

**It's always darkest before the giant alien army.**

* * *

Eris Morn ran.

Regolith slid under her feet as she dug her toes in and powered up the side of a dune. Two thralls at the top of the ridge crossed one another's paths and stared down her with their green shard eyes, and the Hunter pushed upward with her feet and the knife in her hand and bounded toward them on to the flat of Mare Imbrium. One hand she cupped around a neck and drew just in time to slice a deep line of ichor across the throat. She shot the other thrall through the ribs, and moved away before she saw them fall. The ridge in front of her was high and gray, and she kept climbing, making up for the time she had lost when the mob and the quake drove her down.

Past the ridge was the battle. Guardians staggered in ones and twos across the dark gray rock, too wounded to die and too alive to revive. It would be a kindness for them to die, but Eris would not be the messenger that told them that if they didn't figure it out themselves.

As she fell down the cliff, she had thought she heard the Hive behind her: the thralls' footsteps like dried leaves, the thump of knights' feet. She had landed on her forearms, the regolith tearing filaments from her fieldweave. Eris had breathed deep and felt the gap between her and the other Guardians like a pit. The world had been turned on its side now, the rocks clattering around the people as they fell.

The Earth had risen during the battle. Occasionally, ships streaked across its face, fleeing or aiding the battle. Would there be enough? Would all the warriors the Tower could send be enough?

Eris' faith in the Traveler was a practical one. There were only so many Guardians in its gracious shadow.

All talk about the Festival of the Lost had been bitter that year, because there were so many dead.

The festival had been inherited by the Tower from the City, Eris knew. Refugees had started it, maybe when the Fallen first came, or the Collapse broke civilization open. For Guardians, the Festival was still a new tradition, one which they celebrated with vigor and martial mourning. The Hive, corpse-cold and shuffling, brought death close to the Guardians on both a spiritual and physical level. Morale was being sapped, and maybe it was knowledge, not victory, that would ensure it. Victory seemed impossible, but at least they could say that they knew what the Hive could throw against them? At least they knew now how long they could stand in front of a blast without being burned?

It would be even worse after this.

It already felt like it had been long ago when things had risen out of the pit on Mare Imbrium: wizards of unmatched power, and a creature with a sword that left streaks of blackened dust radiating out as if a meteor had hit the moon. It had killed swaths of Guardians at a time with an energy that made the world seem to turn in on itself and Eris' eyes water. Its last strike had taken her footing and tossed her off the hill. The Hive juggernaut was still there beyond the lip of the pit, sending out its Darkness, but it knew the Guardians were on the retreat. They would have to fall back to the ruined buildings if they were going to go anywhere, risking the narrow passes.

Eris scooted into the shadow of a stone when she reached the open plain. People were disorganized there, but worked on shoring up the flank of their retreat. Fares of fire and golden gunshots colored the nearly bloodless battle as ranks advanced and broke against the swarms of Hive. With the Guardians' backs to her, Eris could hardly see the Hive lines. Next to her, though, someone skating three feet above the ground on clouds of energy was pierced by bullets that bowled them over and exploded again, belatedly, in the disintegrating body that collapsed like crumpled cloth. The Guardian's Ghost snapped out, forming a sphere of binding blue energy.

Beyond it, beyond a few other Ghosts floating over corpses as they knit bodies back together, an Exo burned a Hive wizard up with yellow fire. Eriana-3, commander of one of the Warlock brigades that had been among the first to advance, glowed like a sunny day in the steppe. The gunfire reflected off her silver helmet, further confusing the blinding blasts around her.

Eriana saw Eris and, with a tip of her helmet, became Eris' next priority. _Protect the people around you. Know the lay of the land._

"Any word from the Vanguard?" Eris whispered to her Ghost. The dry click in response meant that there had been nothing. As the sunfire burnt out in a line across the regolith like a fuse - perhaps where oil from Eriana's own body had dropped - a hole opened up in the Hive lines. Eris sprinted to Eriana's side and spoke

"Cleared out the thralls over the ridge," she told Eriana.

"I know his name," Eriana said. Her voice was high and throaty. Gloating, unlike her usual calm.

"Who?" Eris braced her aching elbows more firmly as she tracked a knight with her pistol sights.

"The Hive lord who slew our ranks. His name is Crota."

Eris thought of the darkness coming down, the sword, the blast that had pushed her down the hill. She had landed on her shoulder on the way and thought she felt the a string of muscle tear.

"How do you know?"

A wizard plummeted toward them, a toothless mouth screaming in a leathery face. It was already wounded, a hole in its side bleeding gray smoke, but Eriana too had exhausted her reserve of sun energy. She fired at its head as Eris angled around and lined up her own shot.

Straight through the wizard's cheek, bits of skin flaking off like leaves.

"One of these told me," Eriana said, and slammed her rifle against the wizard's wounded side.

The creature fell bonelessly to the ground, started to dissolve into grave dirt. Another arced right over it, though, blasting green energy that separated Eris and Eriana. Eris backpedaled, almost backing into a Titan wrestling with a knight.

Eriana, like the rest of the Exos, had been built to be a war machine with emotions. What advantage could possibly come from her voice thickening? She fired again, disintegrated a pack of thralls. What element put the ache in her tone? She said, "It told me that we are fighting a Hive prince called Crota. It told me to find the twilight world under the dead star eye, and it told me that Wei Ning was dead."

The ground began to shake, and Eriana, Eris, and the Titan looked up at the same time.

"Their prince has returned?" Eris muttered. Then, "I'm sorry."

"She died fighting," Eriana said. Only her helmet was turned toward Eris, but Eris knew - could read the set of Eriana's shoulders under the fall of her cloak.

A crack like lightning left blue afterimages in eyes she suddenly squeezed shut. The ground did not so much crack as undulate, spitting pebbles that floated slowly downward in the light gravity. The Titan was flung off his feet, and the knight brought its sword down. Eris and Eriana were crowded together suddenly, between more thralls and the new ridge in the land. Their shoulders hit, Eriana's Warlock bond glowing bright yellow against Eris' black fieldweave.

"Go left," Eriana said. "We'll try to support that Titan."

Eris went, hearing Eriana laboring slightly behind her. Again Eris climbed a hill, faster this time without an invisible threat behind her. The threats were certainly visible now, Hive running around unstable ground in dark packs.

The Titan had gone to one knee, but scorch marks and dissolving Hive said that he had struck out and won just a moment ago. He was injured, though, his Ghost bobbing frantically around a gash in his leg that oozed blood onto his armor. Human, Eris thought distantly. She tried to lean around the Ghost to see more clearly, without breaching personal space and touching it.

The Titan grunted, his head down. He was still scanning for Hive, had probably seen the two knights lumbering toward them while Guardians moved parallel to them just behind them, driving thralls and wizards into a swirling mess of a battle.

"Where's your team?" Eris asked.

With another grunt from the Guardian, the Ghost patched her in.

"Your team."

"Your Titan needs help," Eris told the strangers, propping her gun on her knee and watching the knights. Eriana, crouched on the side of the hill, had the Hive in her sights.

"Thanks, Guardian," came a woman's voice.

Eris edged around the Ghost and patted the Titan on the shoulder. "Your people are on their way."

"Thank you," Eriana said to Eris on a private channel, tired and relieved.

The Darkness was still weighing down, and both of them could feel it. Eris knew this when Eriana's Ghost appeared, flitting nervously around the Exo's head and speaking in a voice like a young girl. "It might be wise to get out of here."

"No. Keep looking," Eriana said, and lifted both her face and her gun toward the army in the distance. Other Guardians around her hackled, bounced on their toes, or took off at a jog, to defend larger groups of the survivors who had been driven back and back, dying every time. Eriana kept moving among the bodies with an almost joyous energy, and Eris followed, scouting for weapons and strange footprints.

"What are we looking for?" Eris finally asked.

Eriana looked back at her, yellow eyes glowing steadily. "Remnants of the energy that attack used, or their energy supply, or anything we can find. Ikora knows the Hive are cloaked in concentrated darkness, but so little else."

There was another wave coming toward them, two ogres hanging their tumorous heads low toward the marching cadre of thralls and knights. Behind them came another wizard, her skull heavy with horns and bone bracelets ringing her hands. The Darkness pushed down on them, on the backs of limping Guardians and Ghosts struggling through ministrations. Eris could feel the energy of her own Ghost like a drop of water in a desert.

The ogres fired, and energy came down all around Eriana in a blazing circle. In the distance she could see the form of the horned Hive king, flickering like static, raising a black sword.

Something watched from behind the blade of the sword: something that asked: Who are you? Her bones answered: Eris, who was waked in a car wreck; Eris, who was chosen by the Light and chose it back; Eris, who when she hunted and tracked felt like she had all the knowledge of the universe under her feet. Eris, who could read people, and in this colossus read a death as sure as gravity.

It asked: But Eris, who are you when you're alone?

"We have to go," Eris shouted, stumbling over the words, and reached out for Eriana, and the Ghosts tugged both of them away.

* * *

They stumbled toward one another when they met again at the Tower. The moonrise wouldn't ever be the same, not with all those final deaths on it, and when Eriana-3 saw it she curled an armored fist. Beside her on the Tower balcony, in the blue-silver of the full moon, Eris patted her hand on her own folded legs and thought that Eriana took the slaughter harder than her. Wei Ning had been there, after all, and her Ghost choked on Darkness like the others. To Eris the moonrise was a frontier gone bloodier and wilder than it had been, or a weapon hanging suddenly so close above their heads: to Eriana, it was just one thousand and one funerals.

The whole Tower felt some measure of that grief: Some Guardians accused the Vanguard of misjudgment, but most blamed them more for sending unskilled warriors (that being, anyone except the one who accused) into the fray.

Eriana had not spoken since they left the crowds of shocked and directionless Guardians who had retreated. Ships were still eking in. Like refugees, Eris thought. We're all a little more homeless now.

She reached out to Eriana, closed her fingers around the air before they could touch the Warlock's shoulder. Eris was comfortable with letting other people confide in her, but she had not had to do it so often before. Eris grew impatient of the war in everything from its campaigns to the tiny interactions between its fighters.

"I know what I'm going to do," Eriana said.

Eris withdrew, curious.

"The attack wasn't precise enough." Eriana's throat lights flicked on and off in Exo distress. With her, Eris knew, this as often meant deep thinking as worrying. "We know how to charge in. I've searched the books and the dead records." She ran her thumb over her fingers, remembering old burns. "We don't know how to move with the forces he throws at us. The Hellmouth is a puzzle, not just a big army."

Another ship came in, and she said, quietly, "It is also a big army."

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to find one of the Warlocks who were exiled from the Tower." She didn't flash guilt, or change the way she sat, turned half-away from Eris, half-away from the moon. "Toland the Shattered or Osiris. They know about the pieces of the puzzle."

Osiris explored the wilds of Venus, Eris thought, and Toland succumbed to the Darkness. These were the stories she heard, but they were Warlock rumors, and she had been most curious about where one went if one was exiled. Halfway across the world? To another planet? To the remains of a Tower?

Those ideas, which caused her to look down from the moon and across the dark, rumpled mountains, finally dislodged her grief. The moon was falling and the Hive would overwhelm them all, turning the Towers to tunnels. Eriana had given her direction too, though. If the world became as dark as that then Eris, like Eriana, would search through the wreckage that remained.

"I'm sorry about Wei Ning," she said.

Eriana's lights stayed steady as she looked at the moon. She nodded, and they sat in silence for a time.


	2. Weaponize

**Anything can be weaponized. The question is, how much damage does it do to the wielder?**

* * *

The trees were strange to Eris, tall stalks and leaves folding back in on themselves. Eriana tripped wards as soon as she came within a kilometer of Toland's bunker, but she shielded herself and Eris slipped in, driven by an irritation that had come upon her suddenly. This person was going to make it difficult for them to find him, was going to observe the Hive instead of hating them, and that seemed like a waste of time. It was a very Hunter way, although the exile was a Warlock. It was also a cruel trick at a time like this.

Both Toland and Osiris had been removed from the rans of the Guardians because of their own actions, Eris thought as she brushed past the trees. Osiris had run farther, taken stranger paths than Toland. A branch nearly snapped under her foot, and Eris blinked a few steps, folding reality to land silently on a patch of grass. A quick look around showed the trees thinning to her right, letting some of the watery gray moonlight in. Here at the edge of the tundra, just far enough away from the Tower to be out of its sphere of influences but not so far as to make return impossible, the wilds were capricious and prickly.

Eris was impatient, and Toland the Shattered was not.

Something bomb-shaped whistled past her ear and embedded itself in the ground.

She blinked away, but she was used to moving just precisely as far as she needed to go, and this thing didn't have the blast radius she expected. White strands like spiderweb filled up her vision, and the air felt suddenly thick. Eris bared her teeth, and her Ghost, quicker, manifested and shouted that it was a friend.

It was another electronic voice that answered. "Stay where you are. Do you know how long the stasis lasts?"

Eris thought the voice had been a Ghost, but when the fog from the bomb started to dissipate, a person stood there too. The bomb did not make her limbs feel heavy, so it wasn't an aerosol, or anything mental: just trapped air, forcing her to move sluggishly through the blue-white blur. Stasis. It could have even been here before the war, although she'd never seen this type before - and for her, a Hunter, to walk into a trap? It must have been buried deep, or, more frighteningly, too strangely made to be on her radar, either with her helmet or her eyes.

When she tried to move her limbs, she swam slowly forward. That had to be Toland standing there, just watching her, and for this reason she raised her gun but propped her finger away from the trigger. What would he respect? Bluster or kindness? Eriana would give the latter most of all, Eris thought, but she was also devious, and Eris was also wise.

The effect wore off after long seconds, in which Eris counted her own breaths and felt her arms ache under the weight of the gun. The figure in front of her approached cautiously. It was shaped like a human indeed, a man skinny and cloaked like a Warlock. He listed to the left, toward his still-holstered gun. To her relief, Eris' Ghost reported that Eriana was moving uneasily in from the other side.

The Exo emerged behind the stranger just as the blurring effects of the grenade wore off. With the obscuring fog gone, she could see the person in front of her more clearly. An ex-Guardian for sure, his sleeve not even stitched where his Warlock bond had been torn off.

"Toland?" Eriana said. "We need your help."

The figure tipped its head.

Toland the Shattered wore a deep black cloak and a helmet studded with metal pieces. A Ghost hovered close by his right ear, but the voice had come from the mask.

"Emissaries," he drawled. "Or thieves from the Tower? Which are you? Which do you think you are?"

"Neither," Eriana said immediately.

"Heavily armed thieves."

"You didn't see what the Hive did," Eriana said.

"This time? The Hive do a lot of things. Sing many songs." Toland dropped the pretense of ignorance then, and started questioning back. He looked back and forth over his shoulder between Eris and Eriana, to all appearances comfortably. "Why did you come here?"

"You know more than anyone else about the Darkness," Eriana said, rushing.

There was something unsettling about Toland's tone, or about his stance. Eris couldn't name it, but it was more than the usual Warlock aloofness: a sense of unbalance. There could have been no face at all behind the mask.

"We came here to find a weapon against the Hive," Eriana said. "They've taken the moon, and they're approaching too close to Earth. You know more about them than anyone."

"Guardians want me to join them." He laughed quietly. "I was forbidden from returning, you know. The ivory tower is a horn pointing."

Eriana's voice was strong, her stance disarming. She could have been in a circle of friends. "We do. We're putting a team together. We can provide any resource the Guardians can give that you might need."

"And the Vanguard?"

"They don't know."

Toland tipped his head, then laughed - a small, nasty sound. "Were you exiled also?"

"No," Eriana responded, immediately but not defensive. "We've just returned from Mare Imbrium."

Toland's Ghost twitched, maybe checking to see whether that was true. Toland said, "Follow me, lost Guardians. So, you came to compare notes." This he said as if to himself. "I saw that, you know. The flashes on the moon. The spectra were consistent with the Hive Knights spotted on Earth. Did you hear the singing?"

Eriana looked at Eris.

"There was no singing," Eris said.

"But there was a lot of dying."

He lowered his helmet as he walked in front of them, so that the first Eris saw of Toland the Shattered was thin black hair, longer than her own, and the red scars that ran from the back of his neck to his chin.

"I interrogated one of theirs," Eriana said, loudly, and so when Toland turned around the first expression Eris saw on his sallow face was one of startled approval. "I heard no singing."

This disappointed Toland again. His hand drifted toward his gun, and he turned away from them.

He had a hideout built into the side of a cliff. Judging from the writing on the thick door the place was pre-collapse, hardened against radiation and stocked with food. She didn't know what state it had been in when he had been exiled, but from the black scoring on the door she thought either its inhabitants or the door itself had been contested. Toland hesitated at the door, unlocking wards Eris couldn't see but that made Eriana whistle.

In the bunker he had shelves of books and stones, cloths draped over strange shapes. The air was stuffy but filtered: she could see the vents in the high corners. The walls looked pre-Golden Age, heavy and rusted. Toland moved between the stacks carefully, but Eris and Eriana had to work in order to not knock anything over. The place gave an unsettling impression of contortion, and the three people standing in the middle of it were odd-shaped puzzle pieces.

"I suppose threatening to kill you won't matter much," Toland said, moving into the bunker with his cloak flaring behind him. "So if you fight me here, I'll have to keep you."

There was a thrall tacked to the wall.

"How did you find me here?" Toland asked, turning abruptly to Eriana. Whether he could tell that she was the leader by body language or her own bearing, or had chosen her because she had not tripped his trap, Eris did not know. Pulled from the shadow in which she usually fought them, the thrall was bone-white and porous, its thick exoskeleton poked with lacunae and black scabs. Armor almost indistinguishable from the skeleton hung off its ribs.

"The Vanguard isn't ignorant of where they sent their exile," Eriana said. "There are records."

"You stole from the Vanguard?" Toland tipped his head.

Then thrall's eyeless face looked back and forth, the skull like a white cap. Wires had been driven through its hands, but it was bound to the wall with electrical tape, its feet a handspan off the floor. Eris' lip curled. Why keep this inside where it could nearly explode at any moment? Why torture it?

"I did worse to the Hive," Eriana said, and Eris jerked her head toward her in surprise. Eriana was ignoring the thrall completely, even when it made a small, gurgling sound.

"We have a bargain for you," Eriana said.

Toland folded his arms, glanced at Eris, or perhaps the thrall.

"We need your expertise, and you need to get to the moon," the Exo continued.

"People have tried, before Mare Imbrium and after. And why would you succeed in doing that?"

"Frankly, because of you. But also because we'll have the best Guardians I know, and we will go straight in. No patrolling, no waiting for their leader to come out on its own terms. Straight into the pit, if we find a way."

"You know about the pit." Toland seemed curious again.

"I know the Swarm Prince's name."

That information tolled like a bell in Toland's head: Eris saw it widen his eyes, and he stared at Eriana for a full three heartbeats.

"What things we can learn from names," Toland said.

Eriana was blunt. "You want that."

"I have my suspicions. Patterns, waves on the ancient ocean."

"We have it."

The Warlocks looked at one another, and Eris felt that she was looking at them from a distance - herself and the field and the dead thrall staked to the wall, somewhere else.

And Toland agreed to go with them, to be smuggled in to the City. Toland turned a corner and came back with a pack, as if he had been ready to go at any time.

"What about the thrall?" Eris said. Her voice seemed to echo.

"Ah, this."

When Toland moved toward the thrall it tried to thrash, lifting bony knees and turning its head. "My loyal power supply. It's dead current, but it provides."

He touched one dangling slab of armor, running his finger down the broken edge until his black glove picked up dust.

He killed it with a snap of Void energy Eris could feel like a puff of cold wind. The walls shuddered, and Toland motioned as if he was gathering the Void back in, stabilizing it.

"You just kept that?" Eris said.

He turned to look at her full-on for the first time. "Only for a few weeks."

Of course he studied the Hive. She just hadn't expected him to pin them up like butterflies to cards.

After that, Toland followed them home.

He took the move into the City with a calm that Eris and Eriana found suspicious, and several times they discussed whether he was leading them into a trap, despite the overwhelming appearance of the opposite. Eriana had numbers. Eriana had the City, and Toland still gave the impression, somehow, of having the upper hand.

The apartment Eriana had somehow claimed in the City became a home to them, although Eris and Tarlowe were the most outspokenly nervous about operating outside of the Tower. Their mission was authorized, Eriana said repeatedly. She was still speaking to Ikora Rey with some regularity, and there was no law to say they couldn't go back to the moon. No law other than the law of the Hive, anyway, the law of one army crashing against another and creating new boundaries and borders. Eris did not often speak to Andal Brask, and so felt that her mild relationship to the Vanguard was unchanged, except for bringing in the exile.

One of the first long conversations she had with Toland the Shattered came after he had been in the City for a few weeks, with all the books and trinkets moved with him. The result was a cluttered two-room home on a block in the City where bad infrastructure or bad connections meant that power outages struck weekly. She, Eriana, and their Ghosts had scanned them for corruption or explosives. Toland spoke of possessing secrets that could not be explained without deconstructing Guardian dogma, and having seen his collection, she believed him.

Eriana and Toland scoured the archives for the name Crota, for anything Toland might have missed or which could be unlocked now that they knew the Hive leader's name. Eris sometimes ranged out in the field, looking to kill more Hive instead of study them, but almost as often she was tasked with flipping through books to find one sigil, one mention, in a language she couldn't read. No one asked about the angrier red of Toland's branching scars.

He happened or conspired to appear at the end of one of the stacks, and looked at her with a gaze that could have been assessing the books instead of acknowledging any human presence. He had told them of the hierarchy of the Hive, and how Crota was only a prince, and his eyes had grown distant when he spoke of the Deathsingers.

"Haven't found anything yet. There must be more information here, " Eris said, and when she did his eyes lit up.

She would think about that recognition later that day, considering the platonic spark. It was the same kind of hunger with which Toland addressed Eriana's inquiries about the Hive, but perhaps directionless in comparison. Toland's research was pointed, not meandering, but Eris could not see all the connections between the various arcana yet.

For now, he put a hand on the spine of a book. "Eriana mourned. But you … there's something incomplete about your relationship to that battle."

"I wasn't there," Eris said, pressing her lips tight together for a moment as she realized her mistake. She wrestled the other words out, staring at the shadows over his shoulder. "That is to say, I was there, on that plain. I was driven away from the central battle before the Hive leader arrived on the battlefield. When the cleaver came down I was in cover. Fighting off thralls, more and more of them, but still, over a ridge that gave me cover."

Toland drew himself a little taller. "Incomplete indeed. You misplaced your war."

Eris felt her cheeks burn. "My friends were there too. Close friends. Don't think I'm not just as driven as her."

"Of course not. You're almost Warlock in that drive. I admire the … efficiency of that."

"Thank you." She put a hand on the shelf too for a moment, turning away from him to look at the spines of the books. "And are you fighting out of curiosity?"

"Usually. It's so hard to explain some times, so hard to explain … "

He looked away for a moment, and she thought she saw fear in among the anger. Maybe that was some of the strangeness in his eyes.

She jumped after it. "We've all died before, you know. Some Guardians get cynical. They become either thanatonauts or hermits. I don't think you're either of those things." She turned toward him, and now he shrunk back, lowering his shoulders. "That exploration bores you, and you aren't out here by choice."

She put more fire than she expected into the last word, and it was apparently enough. He eased back, settled, folding his arms. Let her go.


	3. And The Grief?

**And the grief? I'll punch it, too.**

* * *

Eriana had a list of the others who would join their party.

"Vell Tarlowe, Sai Mota, and Omar Agah," she said. "We need Titans, and I know exactly the one we can find in the Tower."

Eris rushed a few steps to keep up with her in the hall leading past the hangar.

Eriana continued. "Wei Ning knew Tarlowe."

Her voice didn't catch on the name, but Eris knew that the grief would come in unexpected spurts - in the field, at night, at any moment when Eriana was left alone. In building a team, Eriana had weaponized her loss.

"In fact, she trained him. Kid would tag along with us sometimes."

Eris nodded, looked aside to watch ships come in. A large group of Guardians stood in the shadows on the opposite side, talking in low voices, slinging their arms over the sides of couches. People wanted to stick together after the terrible battle, and who would blame them if some rearranged factions while they did it? They all sat in the purple light of the Festival of the Lost candles. Dead Orbit profited and New Monarchy still profited, and any scuffles were a release of loss.

Eris expected to be able to identify the Titan as soon as the two of them stepped into the bar. Any acolyte of Wei Ning, she thought, wouldn't be sitting down for long.

Instead, she saw a tangle of Titans around two couches and a table on the far left. Eriana reached her hands between two arms and tried to just push her way in.

Someone with a horned helmet looked her up and down.

"I'm looking for Vell Tarlowe," Eriana said, her lights flashing in alarm sequences, and the Awoken to her left nodded toward the back of the room.

"He isn't here," she said. "Look over there."

Both of the Titan's body language inclined to the right, and so Eriana went, and the wall closed up behind her. Eris squeezed herself sideways along the wall to follow.

Vell Tarlowe had very little room for himself, but it didn't matter much. He was short, although he wore white armor that gave him more bulk. Stubby legs in bulky boots were kicked up on a table. He had hung his head over the back of the couch, so that his eyes would have been level with the midriffs of the people behind him if he had been looking.

He wasn't, and Eriana balked because of it. He held a drawing on a scrap of paper, of a face Eris recognized only because of Eriana's sudden, alarmed signaling. Tarlowe, the runt Titan Wei Ning had attached herself to as much as she did to any of them, was also mourning.

Eriana stopped in front of him, spoke as if he was looking at her. As if they had already been talking for hours. "How are you taking it?"

"With vodka," Tarlowe said, lifting his head, and swung his legs off the table. He raised his wide shoulders off the couch as he sat forward, and now Eris could see the dark blue skin of his face and the markings striped across it. "What do you … Oh. You knew her."

"We're trying to avenge her," Eriana said.

Tarlowe's mouth quirked. "Okay."

"We're building a fireteam to go after the Hive alone. The attack on the moon was terrible, but it was imprecise," Eriana began, but Tarlowe stood up.

"I said okay. Where do we begin?"

Eris started to speak, then stumbled over her words. Eriana smiled.


	4. Death Is A Constriction

**Death is a constriction of both the killer and the killed.**

* * *

You'll be able to find her, Eriana had said, and Eris knew the implication was that a fellow Hunter could find Sai Mota fastest. She looked at Eriana and wondered whether her lights were dimmer, whether her gaze was just slightly more roaming and distracted, just a little more like Toland's. What did the Warlocks talk about? Toland was not reticent to tell his theories to anyone, which had probably been part of why he was exiled: he took a suspicious pleasure in seeing the looks on the faces of those to whom he imparted his ideas about the Darkness as a sentient force the Guardians could leash like an animal.

It was Eriana who had suggested Sai Mota for the mission, as well as suggesting Tarlowe and another, Omar Agah, would would prove more difficult to track down. Sai's name was spoken around as one of the more thoughtful of the Hunters, as well as an accomplished Bladedancer. Eris thought that Eriana had her priorities reversed, but would not go back on her friend and commander's wishes. The delay in finding Omar, however, seemed to irritate Eriana; he was away on a mission, she said, and Andal Brask might lead Eris to him.

It was her Hunter knowledge that lead her to Sai Mota, although not in the way she expected. Sai was doing a high-value mission for the Vanguard in the Cosmodrome. Crota's forces had been seen there, Knights imbued with his strange power. Eris followed the crowd.

By the time Eris arrived, Sai was keyed up and antsy. She had taken off her helmet and drummed her fingers on her leg, waiting with the others for a Fallen supply run. The high-value target had interrupted the Hive hunt, but with this many Guardians the patrol teams thought they could band together and take the Fallen quickly. She turned around when Eris got within a few feet her. Awoken, as Eris had suspected from her feathery hair and the careful way she carried herself. Sai Mota was probably Reef-born, Eris thought, cognizant that the stereotypes weren't always something to go on, but sometimes they were. Sai Mota looked like she was about to fly away.

Eris rounded on her and caught her eyes immediately, wondering whether if this would be as easy as Vell Tarlowe's recruitment. "Sai Mota. I was looking for you."

"Me?" Sai said, looking back and forth between Eris and the sky. A Guardian crossed the parched snow behind her, stalking the same prey.

"Yes. You've been recommended - "

"You know there's a supply drop coming?"

"Yes. But - "

'Should come from the south. I'll race you to that hill."

Sai Mota disappeared. She emerged on a hillock a moment later, looking at Eris over her shoulder. She pointed at an outcropping of gray rock at the same time as she tugged her helmet on over short, shining hair.

Eris followed.

The move made sense to her: maybe they could get a jump on both the Fallen ship and the other Guardians eager to loot it. Maybe Sai's jumpiness was a symptom, a reaction to Mare Imbrium in the same way that other Guardians went quiet. Maybe she was just flighty.

Sai jumped ahead again. Eris blinked after, reaching Sai's side halfway to the outcropping, but Sai said "Race!" with the attitude of a younger person explaining something to an older one which they found very obvious. The rest, Sai indicated a moment later by sprinting between puddles, would be on foot for fairness.

"I need to tell you - " Eris said, just beginning to feel her breath come shallow.

Sai interrupted, looking over her shoulder again. "Might even be two ships!"

Eris started to angle for the gentler slope at the back of the outcrop. Her foot almost caught under a stone, but she slammed her foot down on the flat surface instead and teetered between the sharp stones further on before regaining her stride. She shouted at Sai's back. "The Vanguard —"

Sai was going for the steeper side of the vantage point, and Eris swallowed her words as Sai pulled ahead. Eris could get up the gentle slope in two jumps, she knew, and wouldn't even have to blink. Easy. It was a single-minded race then, a childhood race, with the end in sight and nothing, nothing in the sky above them —

Sai tripped. Her feet slid in the thick mix of mud and snow, and her left shoulder took the hit. Eris smiled behind her mask for a moment, knowing that she'd won, before pushing herself to a pace that would exhaust her. She took the hill in two steps as she had planned. Sai immediately sat up, holding a clump of dried grass tight in one fist, and a moment let the broken stems fall and shook her head at them.

Eris extended a hand.

More grass fell to the ground as Sai let herself be pulled up. "I would have beat you," Sai said. "The rock cheated."

"It was wildly out of line," Eris said. "Listen, I'm part of a fireteam that's going to attack the Hive in their pit. Would you join us?"

Sai looked one more time for the Fallen ketch. Said, "Yeah. You should've asked me as soon as you got here."

Eris didn't know then that these were likely to be the majority of the words she ever heard Sai speak: when they returned to the hideout she became silent, and the whole group would need to learn that she spoke more often out on the field, as if the sky drew the words out of her.


	5. Other Frequencies

**Some things speak on other frequencies  
**

* * *

In the Tower, she could almost pretend that the war had already passed them by. The tense signs persisted. The Speaker, some said, had become reluctant to speak. Eris moved from person to person, checking on those who she knew were still alive. There were fewer than there should have been, or fewer than there were before.

"We just have to keep moving on," an Awoken Hunter told her in the middle of the crowd, a drink in her hand.

Eris nodded at that Guardian's optimistic determination, but the existence of Eriana's mission was a secret that she couldn't speak aloud. It had to be kept silent because Toland was involved, and because Eriana wanted it to be. Eris didn't say we can do more than move on.

She nodded, as if the Awoken was right. The answer satisfied the Awoken, who sat back on the bench, her long limbs loose.

As each conversation she started fizzled out, Eris completed the errands she needed to do - upgrades, weapons checks, the clout the Vanguard kept watch over. Was it all pointless, if the Hive were to come and destroy everything? Maybe the purpose was the point. Just keep moving.

The lie of omission she had told the Awoken rankled as she stepped into the elevator to the City. Was it kinder to smooth over lies with reassurances? Was that what the Traveler had done, by parking its corpse over the City at all?

 _But Eris, who are you when you're alone?_

She fit easily into the crowd of refugees who had waited for the elevator. Vendors wearing wide hats and carrying bags and cages stood shoulder-to-shoulder with masked Guardians. Two women with purple hair argued about the Reef War, neither of them Awoken.

 _This who I am when I'm alone. Someone in a crowd, someone traveling. A Guardian in amicable opposition to entropy._

The ride down was long, but the close quarters were comfortable. The elevator shuddered into the dock at the bottom and people streamed out, slinging bags over shoulders and dragging carts. The city was autumn-colored, wooden buildings leaning against one another and hung about with red and orange flags. Cold wind stirred her hair. People who weren't wearing armor pulled cloaks and jackets around themselves.

Eris stepped down onto the unpaved street.

Another Guardian stood at the side of the square, one hand hidden in a curl of Warlock robes at his chest. The cloak over his shoulders didn't belong with his armor; it could have been purchased at any stand, or pulled from the piles of items in the apartment.

He wasn't supposed to _leave_.

Eris slipped through the crowd, met Toland with a whisper. "What are you doing here?"

His face was bare under the cloak. "Scanning for resonances. Sniffing out corruption."

She narrowed her eyes. "And did you find any? No, wait. You're not supposed to be here."

"None of these know my face. It was not as memorable as my actions."

To her chagrin, this seemed to be true: everyone was going their own way, in groups or alone. Maybe in the Tower someone would have noticed the curl of Light around him like an event horizon, the prickle of a storm in the distance.

He looked around at the vendors' stalls, at the bright banners hung across the narrow street. "Did you find any corruption on _your_ trip?"

Should she tell him about her insecurities, her fear that their mission was setting her at a distance from other Guardians? It wasn't even a solid fear, just a speculation born of the long ride, and perhaps telling those fears to the person who in part caused them would just create some kind of cycle of fear. Eris' practical nature warred with her fireteam's unnatural separation from the people who they wanted to protect.

"No," Eris said. She started to walk, and Toland fell into step with her without comment.

"Don't you doubt their pious certainty?" He leaned to get a look at her face.

"No." She looked straight ahead.

The words came clipped. "Maybe you should."

"They exiled you. I don't expect _you_ to think they are fair."

"Do you remember the thrall?"

The creature pinned to the wall in Toland's bunker, bleeding ichor, half-alive. Eris moved aside for a woman pulling a cart, two children perched on the back.

Eris said, "It would be hard to forget. You shouldn't have tortured it that way."

"It taught me about the way the Hive see in the dark. It taught me about the biomorphic properties of their skins. It helps, and I thank it for that."

"Is that the kind of help you want from us?"

"I have never pinned a Guardian." Now, she met his eyes when he looked at her from under the cloak. His eyes were sharp and narrow, an ugly green flecked with brown. "You can trust me on that, if little else."

"Sit with me." Eris said. They had arrived at a circle, and she gestured at the edge of a dry fountain. The spire in the center had been carved like a bird with an open beak, now rusted down to the pipe in its throat. "You told me I couldn't trust you," she continued. "That doesn't inspire confidence."

"The facts back it up," Toland said. He sat on the edge of the cracked stone, only now seeming alert to possible watchers. "Hurting any of you wouldn't be advantageous for me. And I think you trust facts."

Eris clasped her own hands, nodded.

"When I first saw you and the thrall … no, let me start earlier. Before you two blundered into my mine I was working on transcribing the song of the Deathsinger. She resists notation. I have continued that study, although sometimes the paper burns my eyes."

"Is it cursed?"

"Sometimes. Other times it is magical and I am tired," Toland said.

His frankness embarrassed her, but he said it with such calm that it was almost an attack. Toland's rawness was also his strength, and perhaps this was what had sent him, burning, out of the Tower.

"Listen," he said. "Eriana-3 convinced me of her resources. You quietly convinced me of your strength. You tell me you go to the Tower and find no corruption. I believe that you believe yourself. You had the same look when you saw the thrall."

"I felt badly for its situation. But it wasn't innocent."

Toland's smile was slow and wide and strange. Eris kept her eyes on his with something that started out as defiance. It mellowed into something companionable.

Eris said, "We can't just keep doing the same things we've always done. That's what this mission is for. But it's also about helping people."

She thought that he might deny that, but instead he shrugged, clasped his own hands in a nervous mirror image of hers.

"We need to get inside," she said, shaken out of her desire to find out more about his ideas. Her desire to argue with him, she thought at first, but it wasn't that. She was more curious than angry, if her compunction to keep looking at him was any indication.

He stood up without fuss, started leading them out of the square. She wasn't familiar with this part of the City, although she knew the direction they needed to take in order to get back to her normal route to the hideout.

"Thank you, Eris," he said, and stopped in the unpaved street, and held out his hands.

She touched his wrists and smiled, meeting his eyes again to dare him to look away. The touch was comfortable, as if from someone she had known for years. If she had been less comfortable she wouldn't have stood in front of him at all, she thought. Would have stood two steps behind like a bodyguard.

Still that whiff of a distant, pent-up storm, and the trickle of Void energy that both of them bled. The tiniest tendrils of the Void seemed to push at her mind, but while it was a Warlock's strength to read, it was a Hunter's strength to be unreadable. His fingers spidered over her armor. "For what?" She asked.

"For listening. For not looking away."

Did he think he had won something? _That_ wasn't what her steps meant.

She tightened her grip on his wrists, raised his hands as the pads of his fingers searched minutely, as if for gaps in her gloves. What would scare him? Not I won't look away, because it was self-evident and because she was beginning to think that he wanted it. Or was it fear itself he wanted?

 _But, Eris, who are you when you're alone?_

"I have seen the way the Darkness twists the mind. I have seen what we can do to it if we fight." Then, "No. That isn't what I meant to say."

A City woman pushed past her, brushing the edge of her cloak. Toland's hood, which had gradually been piling over itself, tipped off the side of his head and took a fuzzy knot of black hair with it. Toland's skull was patchy the scar enflamed. He looked sick.

"You don't look well."

"Ah. A side effect." He seemed to mark the fact that she cared.

She shook her head. "I'll fight beside you as beside any of the others. But … "

He just kept waiting, some kind of expectation in his eyes.

She didn't know what to say, as calm as she was - still as calm as in the elevator, still who she was when she was alone. Said nothing for a moment, asking for no conditions. "It isn't the Darkness that intrigues me."

That smile again. He let go of her wrists a moment before she let go of his, and tripped over his words a few times too. "But something does."

"It's possible."

He turned to walk again, looking at her over a shoulder she wanted to slap. Unmasked, his hair fell down his back. "I find things out."

The crowds were thinner now, and would thin out further as they cut through alleys. "If we stay out here for long, other people will find things out too!"

He didn't answer, thinking, she thought, that the conversation would circle around to the beginning again if he did. She thought the same. She thought about who she was when she was alone.


	6. The Vanguard

**"The Vanguard keep the peace, but they're always arguing. If they aren't, you bet the Tower has probably fallen."**

* * *

Twitchy Hunter. Over-confident Titan. A Warlock confused by his own revival. Eris had been standing on the steps in front of the Vanguard for long enough that she had identified the tells of half of the tyros who walked in looking for gear and secrets and advice.

Andal Brask was keeping her waiting.

The Vanguard stood at the table, hazed in orange sunset light. The penitents filed in and out, and the Vanguard, all three of them, conferred in a rhythm that Eris was unsure was conscious. A hand here, a Ghost there; the Vanguard, astonishingly, stayed out of one another's way unless they didn't intend to.

The more she wondered, the more she thought she might understand Toland: the Vanguard had not listened to his theories either, and so he had waited like this, and tapped his feet. Brask and the others were concerned with matters of the Tower, though, and Eris understood that. They triaged the requests, and the one Eris brought, Brask surely knew, would take some time.

The attack on Mare Imbrium was felt here too: Guardians walked past in pairs and fireteams talking about it, and Eris felt a swell of emotion about how the groups had come together even after the disaster, probably even after several or all of them had been killed. Her own, new team would become that way if they could just find a sixth. If they could all train and learn and kick the Hive in the teeth.

Brask glided to her. The long cloak exaggerated both his height and his quietude, although it seemed like the former should have cancelled out the latter. "Another day almost done. Did you find my friend Sai Mota?" he asked, gesturing for Eris to walk with him. She did, looking up. Brask's cloak fell over shoulders that looked too thin for the rest of his frame. He had guided her through training as a Hunter through her radio, but they had not had a strong relationship afterward: Eris was not sure how the Guardians who visited the Vanguard often did. The Vanguard were too busy, and as one grew, one learned how much one didn't know. The Vanguard kept their secrets so well that it was sometimes hard to remember they had them. This, Eris thought, was not a good way to foster a mentorship: but she had passed beyond needing much mentoring by then.

But more knowledge of Mota - more knowledge of any resource they could use - was better.

"We did. Now we need a fifth. Sai said you might know someone called Omar Agah."

A fifth. Eris had remembered on the way up the elevator that Toland was not, officially, a part of their party.

"I do. Solid kid, does what he's asked and I think he'll have reason to go with you. He won't be back to the Tower for a few days, though. Took a mission on Mars, following some Cabal transmission."

"The Cabal? Are they a priority right now, with the Hive on the moon?"

She regretted it as soon as she said it, but his words reminded her of all the information she had about the Hive: the strange god-names, the mutable physiology, the death they touched that was not death but rather a hand outstretched to another world.

Concentrate on the Hive, first.

Brask said, "That is true, but the Tower must be protected from all possible threats. Another army could be moving."

We're surrounded, he didn't say. The sense of siege was strong at the Tower, and maybe that was what she had been sensing in the tyros - a heightened awareness of having been dropped bleeding into the middle of an escalating war. They weren't just new - they were frightened.

Eris nodded. "I can meet him here."

"My Ghost will send you the information when it's time."

"Don't be surprised when you find us in the city. Eriana has quarters there, with more storage than she can find in the Warlock dorms. For the books."

Eris had delivered this half-truth smoothly, and Brask nodded at it. "And how is Sai?" he asked.

"She's very quiet when she isn't fighting. But she's determined, as much as any of us. Willing to take on this … this thing."

"As I thought."

"Thank you," said Eris, wanting to get away, and Brask noticed it. Immediately, he looked at her from her feet to her hood, like a bird of prey catching movement out of the corner of its eye.

"Get rest and fight hard," said Brask.

Eris held her head high as she left, making sure of long strides and deep breaths. She walked past the place she had stood just as a young Hunter passed her, and she thought that perhaps her formality was her tell.


	7. Many Hands

**Many hands make light work. Confusing work, though. Where did all these hands come from? Why are there so many hands?**

* * *

"He's a plant."

Toland had accused Omar the moment Eris walked in with him, and so she had also found herself subject of that scorn. At Omar's elbow, locked between him and Toland, Eris looked to Eriana for help. She was leaning over a desk, seemingly interrupted from the study of a hand-drawn graph in front of her. Toland had taken the chair and leaned back, propping his heels on the floor. Sai and Vell were both browsing in the stacks, and looked to the door as soon as Eris and Omar entered.

Omar, a taller Hunter than Sai but not as meticulously armed, raised his hands in mock surrender. He held his slit-eyed helmet under his left arm. "I might be a little out of my depth here. Even a little washed up. But definitely not vegetable."

Toland slammed the chair down. "You let the Vanguard choose him?"

"It was a recommendation." Eriana didn't keep her eyes on Toland, but gave him one bright glance. "We need strong people, people we can trust." Maybe a dimming in her eyes was a question as to whether Toland counted as the latter.

Omar lowered his hands, shook the cape hanging from his shoulders as if to remind them all that he had fought as often as any of them. "Brask told me you were one of the groups taking the fight to Crota. That's all I know. I'm up for that."

"What else did Brask tell you?" Toland's voice was a hiss, but it broke and twisted, his accent thickening. Like he was trying to give off quiet menace, Eris thought, but didn't have the quiet for it.

Omar took a deep breath. "He told me that he trusted me, and that he didn't know you very well. Eris, I mean; he didn't mention the rest of you. But he thought she was looking for a fireteam. So, there's that."

"There's that," Toland sneered. Eriana looked like she was about to get up from her chair, and Eris wondered where Toland's behavior had come from; he hadn't interrogated Sai Mota like this, although her recruitment hadn't involved a trip to the Tower and a discussion with the Vanguard who had kicked Toland out of the ranks of the Guardians, either.

"I'm here for the same reason as all the rest of you!" Omar said. "I lost people to the Darkness on the Moon, really lost them. One guy fell into a pit and never returned, somebody else got in a pile of Thrall so deep it burned their Ghost out just being there. She lost an arm before she died, and the body just lay there - come on!"

"You're babbling." Toland stood up.

That was true, Eris thought.

"What if we took your Ghost apart, watched its memories?" Toland said. "The unbinding releases a lot of energy, so if we move a block over —"

Eriana stood up, crossed the room in three long strides, and shoved Omar backward, her hand splayed against his chest plate. This didn't phase him, either because of the armor itself or because this was how he normally communicated, but he stepped back out of deference, his shoulders low. "Fine," he said, sounding like he meant it. "That's fine."

Eriana rounded on Toland next, who didn't step back. Her jaw clacked once, an expression of frustration Eris had only seen her use a few times. It was deliberate, more so than any human stress relief: she did it to show the people around her that she had sublimated something. "Omar, you know Eris. That's Toland. In the back, Sai and Vell."

"That Toland?" Omar tipped his head.

"That Toland," Eriana said flatly.

"Weren't you exiled or something? They said that you'd — "

Toland swatted Omar's Ghost. At first Eris just heard a clang of metal, and the impression of Toland holding on to a spot in the air; then she saw the flanges poking out from between his fingers. Her right shoulder, near which her Ghost usually floated, flinched.

Moving around someone's Ghost was second nature, even in the close quarters; unless the little machine was talkative, it was not likely to interfere with City or Tower life even if it remained manifested.

Omar's Ghost disappeared a moment later, and Omar hit Toland across the face.

Eris shoved in between them before Eriana could, feeling the sudden impact of Omar's elbow and Toland's arm as the two pushed themselves backwards.

"Peacekeeper," Toland accused her, almost spitting.

Eriana's eyes were burning a solid yellow. "Get out."

Eris saw them all notice that Omar's back was to the door, saw how close the group was to having a second exile. Losing either Omar or Toland would deprive them all of resources, though, and Eris saw the moment Eriana and Toland realized that too. It curled Toland's lips, but it dimmed Eriana's eyes.

Eriana drew Eris out from between the others by the wrists. Eris turned around on the other side of the room, her back to a stack of books and a bird skull. Toland was still closer to the back of the room, his nose bleeding, meaning that he would have to walk by Omar in order to leave. Eris saw Eriana have the same idea she did.

"Eris and Toland, go take a walk," Eriana said, abruptly dropping Eris' arms.

"Where?" Eris asked.

"Around the block. Watch for spies from the Vanguard. Omar, stay here. We'll get you acquainted. When they come back, we can talk."

Eriana's authority was absolute. Even Sai Mota, the bystander if anyone was, nodded.

Saying it only made Vell cross his arms and Sai hackle more, but Eris went, feeling for a moment as if she were herding Toland the Shattered in front of her. She pushed him down the street without touching him.

At the corner there was a market, and then more streets in the commercial district grid; Eris wished for a balcony or an open space. She was never more than a run from one on the Tower, and the City produced a kind of claustrophobia. At least if there was a park or an alcove nearby she and Toland could argue alone.

He stopped in front of a store and flicked blood off his fingers. Eris half expected him to lick it, but instead he shook off what he could and held the hand as if wounded. Blood darkened in the sharply defined runnel between his nose and his lips. He muttered, making connections she couldn't hear under his breath.

Didn't all people confuse themselves sometimes? Make connections between subjects they didn't expect to connect - the Hive and a walk in the City, Omar and Toland?

Sometimes it was easy to forget that he had communed with the Darkness. She had forgotten when he met her at the base of the Tower, but the memory was coming back in force.

He unhunched. As soon as he met her eyes she seized his hand and pulled it to her side, dimply aware of his pinched fingers crossing. "What got you exiled from the Tower? Was it this, running away because you annoyed someone?"

His swamp-green eyes narrowed. "Exactly the opposite. I picked up on things and wouldn't let them go. If you pick up enough crumbs, the birds start circling, wondering where their dinner went, and if you pick up enough, deforest enough, the other kind of birds come … _Tell_ me he isn't a plant from the Vanguard." He wormed his hand away. Flakes of dried blood drifted onto the flagstones.

Eris shook her head. "Sent to do what? We never told the Vanguard about you. Right now, Eriana is telling Omar that he's in this for the long haul and that he's not supposed to tell them anything either. You can trust any of us as much as you trust him, or as little."

"So, I'm to believe that babbling child."

"What do you have against him?"

"Only the Vanguard's hands." Toland looked up. A sliver of the Traveler dipped above the buildings, then the whole thing, cloud-swathed, sat on the horizon with the sun hitting the curved silver from the west. "That thing is a god-form just as the Hive worms are god-forms. They make their sacrifices and use them to grow. Did you know that? Carve out a piece of Hive-flesh and it takes the shape of the worm." (This, Eris would learn later, was not entirely true, but rather a victim of Toland's poetry: but the Hive were symbionts, and flexible on the molecular and synaptic levels, and sometimes it was true.) "Guardians throw themselves on the prongs of war for the Traveler, and into what new forms are you growing?"

The shadow of the Tower fell across three- and four-story tenements past Eris' right shoulder.

Toland gestured with long fingers, stirring the air. "Omar had recently come back from a mission about which we know nothing. More than that, it was given to him by the Vanguard of a different order, indicating cross-communication. They know you need one more now, isn't that right?"

While not incorrect, his concerns seemed as if they could have applied to almost anyone. To Sai, or to Eris herself, who had spoken to Brask about Omar. She said, "You could ask him about any of those things. Interrogate him with Eriana, if that makes you more comfortable."

Toland huffed. "Eriana sent her second and her exile to look for spies. If only walking into a trap wasn't _exactly why we're here_ , I would say she was useless."

"They told me you were shattered. They didn't tell me you were _obnoxious_."

"I was in exile. No one had any way to know." He smiled, thin lips and suddenly darting eyes. Carefully curated embarrassment. He was hiding something, but whether it was the fear or the confidence she didn't know.

"I trust Eriana," Eris said, wresting the conversation back. "I trust that since there are six of us now, we can really get started."

Someone walked by the end of the road, a civilian bare-headed and with a tattered cape around their shoulders.

"You know, I do _want_ you to succeed," said Toland, more quietly and slowly than his near-diatribes. "The things going on up there on the moon, the transformation, it's Hive construction like we've never seen it before. Their songs … I can almost hear them from here. You ever hear it? If I could, I think I'd understand better."

"Understand the Deathsingers?"

"The song." A sigh thick with an emotion that didn't touch his eyes. "The bending of the universe, the aerobic flush of matter between the stars and between the hands of the Deathsingers."

"That doesn't tell me what you want from them."

"You want to go there and not be blasted right back. So I'll teach you that." Maybe an edge of scorn now. She realized she had been looking at the blood on his face.

"I hope you can," she said, meaning it.

He shrugged.

"You were exiled for curiosity, weren't you?" she said. "That's a very Warlock thing to do, but you just pointed all the ideas you had at the Darkness and explored it."

"The Vanguard were petty." His lip curled. She thought that maybe he was fighting to talk about something else. "So, now you and I have defined each other. Did you figure out what was missing at Mare Imbrium?"

"Maybe it was just that there weren't any other people around." She started to walk. They were supposed to patrol here, after all, to take a lap and cool off instead of hunting the Darkness or one another - and Toland turned as if something at his back had startled him, and followed.

They went around the block almost silently, her and the exile. He muttered under his breath when they were opposite their own door, and looked at the Tower's slim base while his collar covered his expression. Like a child, Eris thought, bitter about some decision its parents had made.

The City was sparse and crowded, Eris thought. People down here hunted and fished, and either employed or killed the animals left on the tundra. Cats lay on stoops, but in the middle of the day the Guardians were the free ones: freed from industry, choosing war instead. People down here knew about the attack on the Moon, though: there was occasional graffiti of the Traveler, or of what looked like Hive symbols but could as easily have been facsimiles of Guardian emblems.

At the door, Toland pressed his hand against the lock. Eris heard clicking sounds inside as it opened without a key.

Eriana stood by the entrance, just waiting. Beside her, Omar had replaced his helmet.

"We're fine," Eris said immediately, glancing at Toland to be sure that this was true. Whether he took her look as friendliness or a threat, it worked; he hunched his shoulders further but looked up and met Omar's eyes. Rivalry or territoriality strengthened him, so that he straightened his posture. Omar nodded.

Toland swept past him and made for the bookshelves. Although Eris hadn't touched him, she had the sense that she had let something go, or that she had felt the bush of his cloak as something heavy and enveloping. That his hand with the blood drying on it had just left hers. She moved closer to Eriana to get out of the wake of it.


	8. Stay On The Path

**Stay on the path**

* * *

Eris jogged through the dusty, crowded halls of the Warlocks' dorms. The place wasn't entirely unfamiliar to her, since she had been longtime friends with Eriana; now, though, there was more of a rush to people's movements. The same was true throughout the Tower as more and more Guardians tried to throw themselves against Crota's forces, tried to make plans, but as people jostled and shouted to their friends Eris thought that the Warlocks lacked a particular sort of sharp urgency. Hunters knew what it was to be backed into a corner with the walls scraping your shoulders, and they knew it intimately. Warlocks did too, Eris knew, but they also knew it with an overlay of theory.

Eriana's dorm had six bunks, the head of each set tightly and severely against the wall. Three of the Guardians who had lived there kept chests at the foot of their beds, all locked; other than that, she saw possessions scattered around the room. If the room had belonged to Hunters, there would have been fewer.

Eriana stood at the window, and turned fast when she heard Eris at the door. There was a certain panic to her movements; she might have responded the same way to a weapon hitting the outside of the narrow window.

"It's all here," Eriana said. She pointed, stiff and severe, to a pile on her bed. Blankets were wrapped around a lumpy package. Things to stay the night in the City, things to make the charts and circles she and Toland pored over. A sigh out of her, rattling and synthetic. "We can go."

"You asked me to come up?"

Eriana looked down. For a moment, she showed no lights except her eyes. "Wei Ning and I would trade, and - half the time I wouldn't get the stuff back, you know, because she would jump off the Tower in it and leave my best knife in the City anyway."

The light from the windows was a yellow bar; Eris crossed it fast as she moved to hesitate a moment from touching Eriana's shoulder. She rearranged words in her mind for a moment, watched Eriana watching the narrowing of her eyes. "She'd have been with us."

"She'd have jumped right into the dark dimension and punched Crota in the eyes, but we already tried , and that didn't work too well."

Eris moved to the bed without turning her back, picked up the package. Whatever was inside was heavy, and when she touched it, surprised lights ran up and down the back of Eriana's flanges. The Exo didn't protest, though.

"You are the peacekeeper," Eriana said, gently. "You keep us together, even if it's by separating us like angry kids for a while."

Smiling was difficult - alone with the package in her arms, Eriana might have navigated the stairs so slowly - but Eris managed it.

"I haven't had to do that in at least two hours," Eris said. "And you help."

"Still, thank you." A pause. "Did you know Toland admired Wei Ning?"

Eris shook her head.

"He didn't know her well. Just heard about her like everyone else, but there's some admiration there." Eriana fell into step with Eris, who started again to cross the strip of orange light.

"You've been working a lot with him," Eris said.

For the first time, Eriana perked up: more lights coming on, her shoulders straightening. Her empty hands gestured, and Eris held the blanket-wrapped objects tighter.

"The Hive exist parallel to our world," Eriana said. "We're trying to fight them, but they, their leadership, isn't even really there. Their dimensions are governed by something else, and measuring what it is involves shifting your sight to the side just enough…like edging around a curtain, and for a moment it's all edge." She moved her palms together until a tiny gap of orange light sliced between them.

"They're governed by fighting. Resisting them makes sense to them, where for us it's all horror. Or mostly, to some of us, horror. Learning their names is the key, learning the hierarchy in there. But we're putting pieces together. Soon, we'll have enough."

"In there? You mean the pit."

An affirmative flash. "We know the order of things now. And we're giving all of this up." She gestured at the room. "I want to make sure you all understand that. You chose to leave the Tower, so I think you do."

"If it brings us closer to beating the Hive, we're all in on it," Eris said. "I haven't seen a suggestion of anything else from any of them."

Eriana nodded. It remained unspoken that if any of the team were less than committed to the others' survival, it was Toland, the one who also held the key to the Hive gates. They two Guardians walked out together. The doors, the orange light in the Warlocks' room, both narrowed and closed.


	9. Knowing

**Knowing what you don't know is a key stage in gaining competence. This is widely considered the worst stage.**

* * *

The apartment found for them in the City was so crowded with books that it was difficult to notice the rooms tucked into the back. The closet was also full of books, while a mattress almost filled another small room at the back of the first. This was taken in shifts by whichever Guardians were using the hideout for research at present; Toland, Eris presumed, was the only one who slept in the City regularly. The closest facilities were in a public bathhouse down the street.

And although they had gotten used to the place, to the dusty smell of pre-Collapse books and to edging around the guns slung on one another's backs, the rooms still had the capacity to feel crowded. It did when Toland told them to gather for a final briefing.

"We think we've mapped everything," Eriana said, touching Eris on the back for a moment as she gestured the four of them into the front of the room. Omar was standing in front of the door with his arms crossed over his chest, effectively walling it off. Sai and Tarlowe had pulled up the low chairs that had been brought to the building along with the books, and sat talking in low voices.

Toland had flung a patterned cloth over a table. Books and a sharpened bone had been placed back on top of it, teetering on the corners, for wont of any other space to put them.

"And will we be able to kill Crota this evening?" Omar said, drumming his fingers on his leg.

Toland slitted his eyes, but gave the Titan his full attention. Eris watched Eriana as the Exo moved to the side of the table, obscuring the view of the bone knife. Stranger fireteams had gone out to fight dark things; stranger people had taken shifts in thinning beds. Still, Eris felt a rustling in the distance. Once, she had been hunting thralls near Baikonur and saw a tiger, enormous and curtained in matted fur, watching her from a stand of grass the way she watched the mouth of a cave.

"Not this moment," Toland said. "Maybe this evening."

"As long as the knife ain't for the traitors." Omar huffed.

Toland reached behind him for the knife, tapped his fingers fruitlessly on the cloth before blindly finding the sharp edge and then taking the hilt. "This?" He lifted it slowly enough for them all to see, then tossed it to Omar. "This is a curiosity."

The knife almost disappeared in Omar's armored hand. He raised it appreciatively, and Eris saw the moment where he let his guard down - where he forgot what Toland was.

She had found herself becoming familiar with Toland's weighted slouch too, his sallow, almost forceful ugliness and the changeable scar. That was the shattering, he told the entire fireteam once, prompted and without sounding pleased with himself. The Vanguard would say it was something else, but it wasn't.

"So what do we need?" Omar said, balancing the knife and looking at Toland's makeshift presentation.

"Your strength, for one. Light will force us down through the layers of the Darkness, shells upon shells upon shells." Toland stopped, tipped his head as if distracted by his own notions.

Omar looked down his nose at Toland, as suspicious of flattery as, Eris thought, he was right to be.

Toland said, "Eriana and I have completed the plan. Completed our research." He backed against the table, and Eris wondered whether the movement was accidental or affectation. "Crota exists in another realm, a dark throne-place. Our Eriana discovered this before Mare Imbrium." An inclination of a hand toward the Exo. "The forces there are governed by laws of action and intention. To exist in their space is to demand your own existence."

"Your Ghosts will be weakened there," Eriana said, ever practical. Toland's only response to her words, which might have been an interruption and might have been a planned segue, was a slow blink. "Expect it, but we won't be able to fight it until further into the pit."

"Wait." Sai Mota raised a slim hand. "Will it be easy to just walk into the Hellmouth?"

"There are patrol routes all around there," Tarlowe began, but Toland spoke louder.

"Yes."

Again Eriana took up the thread of his speech, telling the Guardians what they should expect. What darkness, what crowds of Knights and uglier things. Six of them could do it, though. Six of them who, although Omar and Toland were still tetchy, would lean on each other even if the surface under them was crumbling worryingly too.

Eriana and Toland traded strategies back and forth, hashing out their descent into the darkness and taking into account the questions the others put forward. Eris saw Omar forgetting, saw him leaning in and trusting. The flattery - and the earnest help - had succeeded. As Toland told them of the many ways they could die in the pit, of the Fist and the hierarchy of the guards of Crota, Eris thought of her own strategies: she had practiced hunting the Hive that Crota sent out into the world.

And then Toland spoke of Ir Yut the Deathsinger, and his eyes became distant and focused, if on anything at all, on the opposite wall, and Eris watched.

When Eriana spoke it was not like an interruption but rather a handing over, a fumbling of his obsession into her hands.

The team watched. Omar uncrossed his arms, lightly holding the bone knife, while Tarlowe occasionally waved his finger in front of his Ghost, so that the little machine would circle.

"Crota's final defense will be the oversoul," Toland said at last. "The Chalice of Light will invigorate our Ghosts, but the oversoul could take us quickly." He wrapped up his stratagems, looked at the Guardians sitting and standing crowded in front of him. Eris began to shift from foot to foot to redistribute her tired weight.

"You're tempted to overestimate the Hive's solidity," Toland said suddenly.

Eriana's lights ran up and down like raised hackles, and Sai sat up straighter.

Toland's voice lowered. "I don't need to worry about underestimation. Not their effectiveness, certainly not; you've seen the havoc they caused, heard the screams that crack the bones in your ears. Instead, the opposite is true. You imagine that they're creatures of this world. They're something else, and they won't let you forget that.

"Eris. I need a volunteer."

She caught his eyes, pulling away from her worried looks between him and Eriana. "Me?"

"Yes. We have had similar talks before. I imagine you might be … interested in this next part."

Eris caught Eriana's eyes, then Sai's; waiting, she realized, for some sort of permission or denial. Their expressions showed the alert confusion of attentive students. Eris went. Toland gave her a dry, cruel smile; he knew he was putting her in the spotlight.

She gave him one back.

He wiggled the cloth out from under the items piled on the table, then shook it out so that dust scattered in little white flecks into the air. "Hold out your hand."

She turned her back to the table and bladed her fingers, and he dropped the cloth over them. It was heavy, and might have pulled at her nails if she hadn't been wearing gloves.

"This is the world." Pushing the edge of the cloth, Toland forced it to flutter around her hands. Eris felt conspicuous and foolish, standing there to be a prop for an illustration, but she stared at the space between Toland's left eye and his ear and reassured herself that she was being useful. The desire to fight the Hive overwhelmed anything else. It became the world. (Perhaps, the desire to spite Toland was a satellite of that world.)

"The Hive slide in and out of our reality on winds of intent and temptation," Toland said. "The Hellmouth touches Crota's world only slightly. There are more things on the limits of that border, but the Hive have not brought these to bear, and so we —" Unexpectedly he wrapped his fingers around Eris' bladed hand, pushing the cloth against her gloves. He kept his eyes on Eriana. "We will find Crota at the calyx, the place where the worlds are thinnest yet, and where the Deathsingers protect and form their world of corpse and law. But this…"

He let go, again brushed the edges of the cloth so that it loosened and billowed. "The liminal place before the deep is also dangerous. We will be on this edge for most of our journey. Remember that you are under the veil."

Sai leaned forward, her gloved hands clasped together. "Are we leaving tonight?"

Toland barely nodded.

It was Eriana who spoke. "The sooner we go, the sooner it's done. We have to lock this place up."

Toland nodded. Eris grasped the cloth from underneath, pulling it into her hand, balling it up, and throwing it onto the table instead of continuing to pretend to be the Hive veil. Eriana began doing for the physical side of the mission what Toland had done for the mystical: advising people about ammo drops, headshots, until Tarlowe insisted he knew what he was doing with a gun. She met Eris' eyes, and Eris saw in her hesitation all their tens of conversations about the loss at Mare Imbrium, about their noble revenge, about the planning that had culminated in this both more quickly and more slowly than Eris had, in her dark speculations, imagined.

Omar lifted the knife Toland had given him, put it down on the cloth, and walked away. Eris thought she saw the blade spark.

The lights went out. Immediately, Tarlowe cursed the City's spotty generators. The shelves, books, chairs, all of the tiny, random corridors - all were shadowy now, giving lie to the idea that the Guardians had made the hideout comfortable. When she moved just a few feet to the side and let the cloth out of her sight, it felt like Eris had stepped into another world. Maybe this foot of floor was a part of the City she knew through other people but did not visit often, or one she had only heard of in passing. The Festival of the Lost was still going on, somewhere in the distance, and her friends were abandoned houses, crumbling around insides blackened by fire.

"Move out!" Eriana said. "Doesn't matter where we're going. Get used to it!" She sounded suddenly manic, less controlled than usual - she sounded, Eris realized, like she was carrying Wei Ning's spirit into battle with her. Maybe she had always intended to say those words, to pretend that she heard Wei Ning's voice again before diving into the pit.

Eris made a decision. Turned to Toland and backed him against the doorframe with a stare and a gesture of her fingers as if around a knife. She didn't sense any flare of power; just a skinny Guardian with his hair falling over his eyes, armed and armored, almost groveling. Omar and Sai shouldered out the door next to them.

"Why did you pick me? And for what?"

Toland showed his surprise, at first. Then came the slow smile. He said, "For the little question and answer session? We had such good talks, Eris."

"No. Why didn't your Ghost heal you when you bled, when Omar hit you?"

"Some experiments require particular instructions. It is used to modulating its healing ability." He grinned, inclined his head to show the scar.

"You picked me for this," she said, sliding her hand into his and jolting to a stop against the barrel of what was, she realized, an unfamiliar gun. "And it's too bad — " Clenched teeth, leaning closer. Something about that scared him. "That I picked you too."

"Stay close in the caves," he said, and blinked. "To all of us. If one dies, the plan changes."

The door slammed shut behind Tarlowe. Something fell of a shelf, not the rustle of paper in the dark but a high-pitched cracking. Eris and Toland looked at each other.


End file.
